Lynda Barry and Matt Groening Talk Love, Hate & Comics (with an Alternative Education emphasis)...
Lynda Weinman Interviews College Pals about Creativity, Inspiration
"Some of you may know me as Lynda, the co-founder of lynda.com, the website where you can learn digital skills, and the season sponsor of UCSB’s Arts & Lectures. What you might not know is that I went to college with The Simpsons creator Matt Groening and cartoonist/author Lynda Barry and that we’ve all been friends for well over 40 years. In anticipation of Matt and Lynda’s upcoming talk, Love, Hate & Comics: The Friendship That Would Not Die, I spoke with them both about their shared history and long-lasting relationship as two of the funniest and most unapologetic frenemies I’ve ever known. Together, their improv will make you laugh, cry, and long to live your life in its most creative mind-set.
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A couple of snippets to grab your attention and read what I think is a thought provoking article on alternative education...
Lynda Barry
"You met in college in 1975. Has your relationship changed over the years? It’s still the same relationship: completely based on wanting to irritate the other one. When he took over the editorship of our college paper, he made a proclamation that he would print anything that anyone submitted. I remember thinking, really? It became my joy to try to find something that he would not print. I began by writing fake letters to the editor, outraged about things that happened to me when I was nine. He printed those. I wrote really crazy shit, like how the media department at our college was now checking out guns, and I was complaining about that. And he published that when of course they weren’t. Then I started making comics that I thought were way too far out to print, but he printed everything. And that was how it started. He was a year older than me at school, and I didn’t understand him at all. I thought he listened to musak, but it was Nino Rota [Fellini’s music composer]. But to me, when I heard it, I thought, ‘Why is this dude listening to musak?’ He was at a hippie school, but he hated hippies. I don’t know if you remember this, but he wore shirts with buttons and shoes with laces."
Matt Groening
Tell us a little bit about your friendship with Lynda and what it means to you. I met Lynda at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, a small progressive school with no grades and no required courses. The student population was made up of every creative weirdo in the Pacific Northwest. And Lynda was one of them, and I was another. And you were another, except you weren’t from the Pacific Northwest! I think that the people who gravitated toward that school were just not interested in business as usual. At the time, the school was so new that it wasn’t even accredited yet, and the conventional wisdom said that we throwing our lives away by going to this crazy hippie college. I think that everybody there believed in the style of education so much that we knew that we weren’t going to make our livings with a college credential but rather that we were going to live by our wits. The school was full of people who felt that way. Then the school did get accredited, and so it became a fine place to be proud to have graduated from."
http://www.independent.com/news/2014/oct/02/lynda-barry-and-matt-groening-talk-emlove-hate-com/#commenttoggle
Excellent and entertaining article and highly recommended reading